Advances to Semantic Interoperability through CPR Ontology extracting from SOAP framework reports

Abstract

We present the work done as a contribution to use an enriched ontology as the support for Semantic Interoperability among technicians and systems in healthcare providing environments. Clinical practice ontologies are the next generation workhorse for automatic reasoning using Semantic Web techniques and tools in the healthcare sub-domain. Acquisition from semi-structured data that renders a full picture of the general clinical practice is crucial for solid enrichment of an Ontology that is designed to embrace the generality of information located in EHR systems. These systems communicate syntactically using HL7 standardized messaging but must evolve to semantic interoperability based in a well formed standardized semantic like CPR. Automated acquisition is absolutely a must given the enormous amounts of information available in the mentioned sources. Recent efforts directed to solve the overwhelming complexity of HL2 CDA archetype, like the greenCDA template proposal, along with computability gained with OWL DL ontologies reasoning is leading to the possibility of development of foundations for strong Clinical Decision Support tools and Computable Semantic Interoperability representations in the Semantic Web. As an intermediate step to acquisition from standardized messaging we present the ontology population/enrichment taken from the widespread framework for communication that is the SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) clinical encounters documenting system.